The Year of Miss Agnes Read online

  There were just five of us left in school. Charlie-Boy and Selina and me and Bokko and Kenny were staying in town until time for fish camp in the summer.

  Spring camp was the best of all, really. Grandpa and Grandma and me and Mamma and Bokko went with Uncle Paddy and his family once, and it was so good.

  We had two white tents we put up by the lake. In ours there were two bunks made from spruce poles, and there was a table and two gas boxes for chairs.

  Uncle Paddy shoveled the snow over the edges of the tents to keep them tight, and set up a little Yukon stove in each tent. Those stoves kept the tents just warm.

  When the ice on the lake melted, Grandpa and Uncle Paddy and the boys would go out in the little canoes and get as many muskrats as they could. Then at night all the grown-ups would skin and stretch the muskrats. When they were skinning, Grandpa told us stories about the old days, when he went for muskrats with his dad.

  They used to make a tent with moose hides, put over willows bent in a bow. They had hard times those years, with no stores. Sometimes they were very hungry in the spring.

  But this year the kids who were going to spring camp were sad. They knew when they got back Miss Agnes would be gone. It would all be over. There would be another teacher next year. Maybe a nice one, even. But never the same as Miss Agnes. What if she wouldn’t let Bokko come to school?

  When we talked like that, Miss Agnes would try to make us like the way things would be.

  “Bokko will go to school,” said Miss Agnes. “The priest at Allakaket said the church is going to send her to a good school for the deaf. When she’s fourteen. It will be good. You’ll see.”

  So Miss Agnes would be gone, and Bokko would be gone. Sometimes I went in the out-house and I cried hard about that.

  Maybe if one of us was smart like that boy of Hudson Stuck’s, the one who was going to be a doctor. Maybe if we didn’t always have that fish smell on us. I know she said she couldn’t even smell anything, but maybe. Maybe she would stay for us and teach us another year. Maybe if this England didn’t have trees with pink flowers on them and that place where people sing so hard it bounces off the walls.

  The days were so warm the ice on the river got rotten and we couldn’t walk on it. Everything sounds louder when the snow is melting, and you can hear noises from a long way off, like the sound of someone chopping wood at the other end of the village.

  Then the ice upriver started to push the ice by our village, and pretty soon that ice was breaking up into smaller pieces and moving down to the Yukon. The ice crunched and smashed along, pieces bumping into each other, noisy.

  When the ice went out, it was almost the end of school and we were all getting ready to go to fish camp.

  Miss Agnes packed her things. She didn’t pack the books or the phonograph or the records. “I leave these for you,” she said. “For next year. You tell the new teacher where the old books are. She’ll likely want to use them.”

  She started to take the map and the pictures off the wall, but when she turned around, we were just staring at her. It seemed like we’d die if she took those things down. So she looked at us and then dusted her hands together the way she always did when she was making up her mind. She didn’t take anything off the walls.

  “We’ll leave it just this way,” she said.

  I helped her some after everyone else had said good-bye and gone. When she had everything packed, she said to me, “This teapot is for you. Remember the first day I came, when you and Bertha had tea with me? This is to remember me by.”

  “Miss Agnes,” I said. “I don’t need nothing to remember you by. Anything,” I said, before she could correct me. “I will always remember you.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Being a teacher is like that. No one ever forgets their teachers.”

  “What will you do when you get to England?” I asked.

  “The first thing is, I’ll get into the subway and ride to Paddington Station.” She smiled. “And then the train to Cambridge. And then … then I’ll find a little house. And I’ll live in it. And I’ll go to King’s Chapel. And have tea in a pub.”

  Her face was sad, and happy, too. I didn’t want to look at her face anymore because I was going to cry, the kind of crying that makes your nose run and your throat ache.

  “I have to go,” I said. “Mamma is waiting for me.”

  Yes,” she said. “Take good care of Bokko, will you?”

  I will,” I said.

  Chapter 17

  We got back from fish camp late in September.

  It was really fun to be there, but I missed Miss Agnes. Since she wouldn’t be our teacher anymore, I wished we could just stay at fish camp all winter, too. Then we wouldn’t have to get used to another new teacher.

  At camp all my cousins from Nulato were there, and the aunts and my uncle Paddy. Bokko taught everyone her sign language. It was the first time she talked to all those people. She wasn’t afraid anymore, or shy like she used to be. They were all happy to see Bokko so easy like now.

  And they all bragged about Mamma when she talked to Bokko with signs, like she was the one who invented sign language. I think that made Mamma feel good, because she was nicer to everyone that summer and not so bossy.

  We had hard work there at fish camp, just like every year. Uncle Paddy and his big boys would put the fish wheel in the river, and then they’d go out every morning in the boat to get the salmon out of the box.

  My aunties and Mamma would cut the fish in strips, and then they’d drop it into the big tub full of salt water. Bokko and me would take it out of the salt water and carry it to the fish racks to hang up to dry.

  It was really hard carrying that slippery, slimy fish just out of the salt water, and if we dropped it in the dirt, our aunties would just yell at us.

  But we got a lot of fish, maybe more than any year. This year I wrote down the fish every day on the calendar. At the end of the week Bokko and I would add up all those fish.

  Bokko and me were the only ones who could add those three numbers across. The grown-ups were proud of us. Mamma didn’t say anything, and she tried to act like she knew all along we could do that adding, but I knew she was proud of us, too. We could tell she didn’t think school was a waste of time anymore.

  It seemed like everything reminded me and Bokko of Miss Agnes. Everything had something to do with what we learned from her, as if we just woke up to see the world around us, and way beyond us.

  But when we thought about the things she taught us we thought about her not being there anymore. There was a lump in my throat every time I thought of that. I thought how we’d go to England to see her, but I knew I was just telling myself a story.

  But maybe we’d always look for that to happen, the way people think something better is always going to happen to them someday.

  It is late at night when we get home from fish camp. It is raining, dark and gloomy. No lights anywhere. Even Old Man Andreson must be asleep. No one knows we’re coming.

  Grandpa ties the boat and jams a pole in the mud to hold the boat away from the bank so it doesn’t swamp. I have to carry the cooking stuff we’re bringing home. It clanks away in an old burlap bag, knocking against my leg. Bokko is carrying another burlap bag with our radio in it, all wrapped up in a piece of tarp.

  When we come around the corner, we see a light in the school. Someone has a lamp there. The new teacher.

  Bokko and I stop to look. I feel terrible, and Bokko does, too, I can tell. We can’t stop ourselves, though. We got to look. I put my bag down and walk softly up to the school window.

  Bokko’s behind me. We look in, but there’s nothing to see. The room is the same, only darker than it was. Only one lamp burning.

  Then we see there’s a yellow cat sitting on the table, licking one paw. His eyes are closed, and he’s licking that paw slowly, slowly. Bokko pulls in her breath sharply. We’ve never seen a cat, just in pictures. It’s so pretty.

  Then someone comes out of the
darkness to shoo that cat off the table.

  And it’s Miss Agnes. Her hair is different somehow, but there are the pants. The cat jumps off the table, and Miss Agnes stops to scold him. And then I hear the music. That King’s Choir. Bokko is crying, like she could hear it, too. Tears are running down her face.

  We stand in the rain and look at Miss Agnes until she moves out of the window and into the back where we can’t see her.

  And then we go home. School will start at nine and we want to get a good night’s sleep.

  I’ll ask her tomorrow why she came back to us.

  About the Author

  Kirkpatrick Hill was raised in Fairbanks, Alaska. She graduated from Syracuse University with majors in English and education, and for the past thirty years has been an elementary-school teacher, spending most of her time in one-room schoolhouses in the Alaskan “bush.” Her two previous books, Toughboy and Sister and Winter Camp, also take place in the Alaskan wilderness and have been immensely popular both in the United States and abroad.